CARMEN.maquia

Ballet Hispanico is celebrating its 55th Anniversary this year at City Center with a GALA celebration and performance of Spanish choreographer Gustavo Ramirez Sansano’s CARMEN.maquia (2012).  CARMEN, originally created as an opera by French composer Georges Bizet in 1875, has been recreated in several iterations over the years because of the featured complexity of its main character, Carmen; her passion, its effect on the two men in her life, and her status as an “outsider” to the cultural norms of the time. 

Sansano’s work in two acts, opens to a set of white cube-like sets (Luis Crespo), and one lone male figure in white struggling, falling to the ground, tumbling, stumbling, and eventually rising. It’s Don José: (Amir J. Baldwin), foretelling the anguish he will eventually experience. 

Cigarreras (women working in a cigarette factory) dressed in white gowns (Costume Design: David Delfín), flanked by two men who stand guard gather.

Sansano’s movement phrases are wildly complex featuring relentless torsos twisting in quick accented shifts, arms often flailing. The dancers exquisitely execute the choreography, but the meaning of it all can be lost in its busyness, not allowing for pauses which could add  weight, or a connection, and meaning between the dancers. 

Carmen (Amanda del Valle) enters in a black gown distinguishes herself from the others, dancing to one of Bizet’s well known works as the women in white surround her — then reject and abandon her as an outcast. 

Scenes continue, the women accusing Carmen of disrepute; Don José (Amir J. Baldwin) enters; she teases and beguiles him with a red handkerchief; he ties her wrists with black rope (symbolic of a letter saying his mother is ill), while a screeching, ominous electric violin pierces the space and one’s nerves. (Various works by Georges Bizet, are performed throughout the production.)

A large Picasso-like painting lowers from above and rises on the scene by set designer Luis Crespo, at times attempting to bring the audience into the Spanish culture and transition the scenes, but instead, seems superfluous. 

In The Arrival, an exquisite pas de deux ensues between Carmen and Don José. She back bends and drapes around his strong and supple body in fluid wrapping. The story continues in The Street, as Escamillo, the toreador enters (Omar Rivéra), dancing a bravado solo. He seduces Carmen and the triangular love affair begins. 

Act II opens to somber music, the white set now positioned throughout the stage in a scene called The Mountain.  Confusion begins when one woman carries a box, then hands it off to others who distribute sections of the  box among themselves. (These are meant to be tarot cards predicting the future.) As if coming out of no where, the somewhat confusing passage moves into a scene called The Cards. 

Two men stand at opposite ends of a diagonal facing each other, eventually dueling; pushing and shoving. However, the gestures feel fake becuse they never really look at each other; again while bound by the relentless movement of the choreography. 

In The Revelation, Escamillo dances to Bizet’s famous  Toreador March, as dancers move down the theater aisles in bolero tops (costumes by Dvid Delfin) that match his.

In The Wedding, which should clearly show Don José’s aggressive murder of Carmen, instead concludes with her quietly sinking to the floor, inauspiciously dying as he grieves, referencing the scene in the very first episode. 

As a storyteller, Sansano often leaves viewers unable to absorb the frantic activity, especially if they are unfamiliar with the original opera. Although at times compelling in its abstractness and force, he has given us too much to absorb and too little to feel.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Mary Seidman